Month: October 2008

to quote Matt Shadetek: “Thanks to the people at YouTube for putting us on the front page and getting us thousands of views, dozens of inane comments and spam and friend requests from random people in the past two hours of it being up there. The internet is a wild and wonderful place.”

like i mentioned before, this video is for a tune on my new Uproot mix CD, produced by 2 young’uns from the Dutty Artz camp, Baby Kites & Nokea, and directed by PanOptic. The only thing different is that 60,000 people have seen it in the past 10 hours.

I just finished editing 7,000-8,000 words strung across two articles – wait, I only handed in one of them, I have 5,000 words to go. Sigh.

But some stuff needs addressing:

1. a lot of people (read: less than 12) have taken my music and made videos. Here’s the latest, made by kids in Guatamela doing an animation workshop! It’s one of my favorites, for its sweetness.
Menos Basura! Compadres, aquí van algunos ejercicios que hemos preparado con la muchá en el taller de animacion. Seguimos con ello hasta final de septiembre. Practicando, jugando, avanzando. La musiquita es del colega Dj Rupture.

2. the mp3-player that UMemeCompetitor and a few others asked about. It feels like product endorsement, but let’s go. I currently use the Meizu Dane-Elec 4GB thingy. Here’s what I needed in a portable mp3 player:

the ability to play MP3s, WAV/AIFFs, and FLACs. FLAC = lossless compression. FLAC files are about half the size of full-audio (mp3s are roughly a tenth) and support metadata (WAVs/AIFFs dont)

an FM tuner that can also record. This is critical I think iPods/iTouch without FM tuners are pathetic, possibly immoral. Radio! as public space!

the tiny, thin Meizu does all that. It costs around $80 for a 4GB version with a big video screen. It has its wonky elements (namely taking minutes to rebuild library after you add new songs), but it does all the above inexpensively. Few other mp3 players do (if you know of alternatives, tell us in the comments). The Meizu is almost too small – these are earbuds, you can get an idea of its size:

& while we’re at it, I use free windows app Foobar2000 to play back audio files. Foobar can natively rip FLACs & mp3s. Its most unexpectedly useful component is the ability to play songs inside ZIP & RAR files.